INFLUENCING THE MASSES

CHAPTER ONE

Overview

Ordinary neighbors can become a revolutionary army and then a mob of executioners in a matter of weeks. What changes when people gather is not obvious, and the usual tools for understanding individuals seem to stop working. Anyone who needs to move such a group faces a problem no amount of reasoning appears to solve.

The Question in the Ashes

On 28 May 1871, Paris was still burning: the Tuileries had been ash for three days, the Hotel de Ville was a blackened shell, and the Quai d'Orsay palace still smoked. Versailles troops under Marshal de Mac-Mahon hunted Communards and shot them; the semaine sanglante killed perhaps ten thousand to twenty thousand people in seven days. A thin, dark-bearded man of thirty walked the streets dressed as a military doctor, taking notes but treating no one. Gustave Le Bon carried a question for twenty-four years: what turned his neighbors, the baker's wife and the pharmacist, into revolutionary soldiers and then executioners? His answer was unsettling: no particular event had to occur. People occupied the same place at the same moment, and a crowd is a different chemical substance from an individual.

A Polymath With a Manual

Le Bon was born in 1841 in Nogent-le-Rotrou, took a medical degree, and never practiced. He wrote on anthropology, archaeology, physics, photography, horsemanship, Buddhism, and Arab civilization, patented a device for measuring criminals' heads, published a cavalry manual used for forty years, and traveled to Nepal, India, and North Africa. He was racist and misogynist in the manner of many European intellectuals of his era. The insight survives; the prescriptions do not. In 1895 he published Psychologie des foules, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, under two hundred pages. It sold slowly, was translated into English, German, Russian, Spanish, and Italian, and by 1920 was the most widely read book on its subject in the West.

Four Claims About Crowds

1. A crowd is not a sum. A thousand people gathered for the same thing form a new creature with its own mind, will, and memory. Hydrogen and oxygen are gases; combined, they make water. Studying individuals to understand a crowd is like studying hydrogen to learn to swim.
2. The creature is impulsive, credulous, incapable of sustained reason, and thinks in images. It exaggerates emotion, knows no half measures, forgets its positions, and can cheer a leader in the morning and lynch him in the afternoon. It is not stupider than its members; the critical part that says wait switches off, and something older and faster switches on. The Paris bourgeois knew burning the Tuileries was terrible, but in the crowd he knew it faintly.
3. To move a crowd there are only three instruments: assertion, repetition, and contagion. Assertion states without proof. Repetition says the same words until they sound like a feature of the world and the hearer forgets who said them first. Contagion follows: a few believe and say it loudly, and others imitate. A chant starts in a stadium and soon twenty-five thousand sing; none decided to sing, their bodies did the rest. The same mechanism carries pogroms.
4. Every crowd has a leader, a meneur, not necessarily the most intelligent or educated, who possesses prestige: self-assurance, theatricality, and absence of doubt. He is a man of action, not a thinker, and seems to believe what he says in a way reasonable people cannot imitate. The recipe to recognize is assertion, repetition, contagion, prestige.

Le Bon worked this out in 1895, before Hollywood, radio, television, and TikTok, from Boulanger's rallies, Hugo's funeral, Dreyfus-affair demonstrations, and memories of the Commune.

The Readers Who Took It Seriously

Mussolini read Le Bon as a young socialist; in a 1932 interview with Emil Ludwig he called The Crowd his bedside book and the key to leading a people. Hitler's Mein Kampf chapter on propaganda echoes Le Bon: the mass thinks in images and simple emotions, the message must be repeated to exhaustion, and propaganda must never be intelligent because it addresses the least intelligent. Lenin read and used him; Bolshevism made mass propaganda a state art. Freud answered in 1921 with Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, accepting a crowd psychology with its own rules.

Le Bon was conservative, authoritarian, and wrong about democracy, women, and races, but descriptively frighteningly accurate. Goebbels's radio, Bernays's campaigns, Berlusconi's talk shows, and Zuckerberg's feeds all kept finding new ways to assert, repeat, and infect. He gave propaganda a manual and made it a science. Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew, born in Vienna and raised in New York, would take that manual to corporations and manufacture public opinion like a car on an assembly line, made to measure for the client who pays.

Key Takeaways

• A crowd behaves as a separate entity with its own impulses and memory, so people who would hesitate alone can be carried into actions none of them would defend afterward.
• Belief moves through a crowd by a mechanical loop rather than by argument: a bare claim repeated until it feels like the shape of the world, then echoed by a few loud voices, can produce coordinated action without anyone consciously choosing it.
• Crowd leadership flows to performed certainty rather than expertise; the person who seems unable to doubt sets the direction, and theatrical self-assurance matters more than intelligence or education.
• The same pattern of assertion and echo became the operating grammar of mass propaganda, advertising, and social media, so it is the pattern to expect wherever large audiences are addressed at once.

CHAPTER TWO

Overview

A public act can look like a spontaneous demand for freedom and still be a paid performance. The question is what happens to a society when its symbols of independence are designed for it, and nobody can tell the difference.

Torches of freedom

On Easter morning, 31 March 1929, ten young women walked up Fifth Avenue past St. Patrick's Cathedral and lit cigarettes in public. Back then that was a scandal, because people took a woman smoking on the street for loose. Photographers had been tipped off two days earlier, and the one reporter interviewed had memorized her line about "torches of freedom" as a blow for emancipation. The women were paid models; the movement did not exist. Edward Bernays, thirty-seven, staged it for the American Tobacco Company, whose president, George Washington Hill, wanted the half of the market that did not smoke. A. A. Brill, an early Freud follower in New York, had told him that in the female unconscious a cigarette stands for the penis, so denying it to women amounted to a kind of castration. The campaign sold an identity rather than a product, and smoking among American women rose by more than three hundred percent over the following decade, according to the book. Bernays later regretted it; his wife took up the habit in those years and struggled to quit.

Vienna, and the Committee on Public Information

Bernays was born in Vienna in 1891 and raised in New York from the age of one. His mother, Anna Freud, was Sigmund Freud's sister, and his father Ely was the brother of Freud's wife Martha, so he was the analyst's nephew twice over. His real schooling came during the First World War, when Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information under George Creel to sell a war that fewer than thirty percent of Americans backed. It produced seventy-five million pieces of print and sent seventy-five thousand Four Minute Men onto movie theater stages to speak during reel changes; within six months support passed seventy percent. When propaganda became a dirty word after the war, Bernays renamed the trade and became a public relations counsel, the first to make a living at it openly.

Selling the frame

In 1925 Beech-Nut's bacon was not selling, because Americans ate toast and coffee. Bernays had his family doctor put the question of whether a large breakfast was healthier to the forty-five hundred physicians on his register, and most agreed that it was. Marketed as a national survey, with eggs and bacon offered as the obvious example, it became the standard middle-class breakfast within three years and the American breakfast within ten. The product was never sold, only the setup that made buying it look natural.

United Fruit had been his client for nearly a decade when Guatemala's elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, moved in 1951 to take over uncultivated estates, paying owners the values they had themselves declared for tax. With the State Department and the CIA, Bernays cast a moderate reformer as Moscow's bridgehead near Texas, flying reporters from the New York Times, Time, Newsweek and Life down on United Fruit's money with prepared dossiers. Eisenhower authorized Operation PBSUCCESS; in June 1954 mercenaries crossed from Honduras, aircraft bombed the capital, and the government collapsed in ten days. The civil war that followed ran thirty-six years and left around two hundred thousand dead, mostly Maya farmers, in killings a United Nations commission later called genocide. He never repented of Guatemala.

Propaganda

Crystallizing Public Opinion appeared in 1923, Propaganda in 1928, The Engineering of Consent in 1947. Propaganda argues that manipulation of mass opinion is essential to democratic society, that those who run this unseen mechanism form a hidden government that truly rules, and that our ideas are suggested by men we have never heard of. He published it openly at three dollars fifty and no one cried scandal. He died in 1995 at a hundred and three, telling Boston University historians his techniques were as potent as atomic bombs but bound by no treaty. He never regretted the trade itself.

Ask ten people picked at random in your own neighborhood who Edward Bernays was and none of them will be able to tell you. Yet the breakfast each of them eats, whether they smoke or have given it up, how they dress, what they assume about Latin American politics in the last century, and even their sense of what counts as masculine or feminine have all been shaped, slightly or substantially, by ideas he set circulating a hundred years ago. He got that far, and almost nobody knows his name.

A counterpart

He had a counterpart in the trade, though not a blood relative: Walter Lippmann, born two years before him and dead twenty-one years before him. Lippmann reached the same conclusions from the opposite direction, starting in politics and ending up in advertising, where Bernays travelled the other way. He was one of the most respected journalists in the country, an adviser to presidents, and known around the world as an intellectual. His best-known book appeared in 1922, a year ahead of Bernays's first, and the two men knew each other and read each other's work. They arrived at the same insight twice within a year, from two directions and two very different standings in public life.

The copy and the original

Lippmann's contribution, made as a working journalist rather than a publicist, was an account of how opinion actually forms. People do not deal with the world directly. They work from a rough copy of it, the version the newspapers hand them each morning, and that copy, not the world itself, governs what they do. It is what they fall in love with and what they go to war over. From it they decide whom to believe and whom to lynch.

The consequences run a long way. If the public acts on a copy rather than on events, then the real fight is a fight over the copy, and whoever prints it holds the power. Bernays arrived at that position from the client's side, selling products and then governments; Lippmann arrived at it from the reporter's side, watching how a story becomes the reality people inhabit.

Lippmann's line of work, and the world he spent his career describing, is where the story goes next.

Key Takeaways

• The persuasive act that outlasted the cigarette was the sale of an identity rather than a product: a rehearsed line and a tipped-off photographer turned a paid stunt into a claim about freedom, and the habit spread through meaning, not argument.
• Bernays's method was to shift the setup until the desired purchase looked like the obvious or healthy choice, and the same technique scales from a doctor's survey about breakfast to the overthrow of a government, with only the budget and the client changing.
• The trade sustained itself through a specific kind of invisibility, renaming propaganda when the word became unusable, publishing its own theory in plain sight without scandal, and leaving its founder unknown to the people whose habits he set.
• The parallel with Lippmann matters more than the coincidence of dates: if people act on the newspaper's version of events rather than on events, then power belongs to whoever prints that version, and both men reached that position from opposite ends of the same business.

CHAPTER THREE

Overview

A public can act on a world it has never directly seen, and the gap between events and what reaches people is where consent becomes both necessary and dangerous. If collective judgment depends on accounts supplied from elsewhere, how can it be formed without being managed?

The Island

In August 1914, a handful of English, French and German colonists on a Pacific island keep dining together, playing bridge and lending books for six weeks after Europe has gone to war. The mail boat comes every sixty days. On 15 September newspapers arrive, and within seconds the same people become enemies, though nothing on the island has changed except what is in their heads. Walter Lippmann told this story at the start of Public Opinion in 1922 to make a claim that governs his thought: we inhabit not the world itself but the reports of it that reach us.

Lippmann's Education

Lippmann was born in New York in 1889 into a wealthy German-Jewish family, entered Harvard at seventeen and studied with William James and George Santayana. He graduated in 1910, was a convinced socialist, and in 1914 helped found The New Republic. In 1917 he joined the Creel Committee and the secret Inquiry, helping write Wilson's Fourteen Points while also producing propaganda that sold the war. At Versailles in 1919 he watched the old empires carve up colonies and Wilson's ideals dismantled. Public Opinion, published three years later, asked why democracy fails to work as textbooks say.

The Pseudo-Environment

Lippmann called the result the pseudo-environment: a secondhand map that stands in for reality. The real world is too vast for any person to know more than a tiny fraction. Yet we have firm views about places we have never visited, and we vote, buy and feel outrage according to pictures drawn by journalists, editors, photographers, algorithms, governments, advertisers, schools and relatives.

Three Observations

Lippmann's account rests on a few observations:

• The map is made largely of stereotypes. Lippmann took a printing term for a reusable plate and gave it its modern meaning: a simplified picture that lets us navigate a world too complex to judge afresh each time. We slot people into boxes marked by types such as the absent-minded professor, the brutal policeman, the precise German and the cold Englishman. They are how perception works, not a defect. Whoever controls a society's stereotypes controls its deepest opinions.
• We see signals, not facts. We resemble a man at the bottom of a well who sees a small circle of sky and infers the weather from the cloud or bird that crosses it. The frame decides what reaches us.
• Politics demands more time and expertise than citizens have. The world's complexity outpaces the leisure available to citizens, so classical democracy, with an informed public deciding, has become a myth.

Lippmann's response was to hand decisions to experts and manufacture of consent, presenting choices in simplified form. He coined the phrase in 1922 and treated it as a positive necessity, not a scandal.

The phrase "manufacture of consent" has since acquired a sinister reputation, although Lippmann presented it as something positive. The irony sharpens because Noam Chomsky later used the same phrase to dissect the American media system, borrowing it from a man who had offered those words as guidance on improving how the system operated. The borrowing is a crossed wire in the history of ideas: a term meant to describe a necessary function of modern governance became a weapon against the institutions that performed it.

The Lippmann-Dewey debate of 1927 remains just as current. Whenever a political argument opposes:

• expertise against democracy
• experts against the people
• technocrats against elections

it is replaying that exchange. Knowing the debate by name and grasping its two poles sharpens the ear for the political arguments one hears today.

Inside the Machine

Le Bon, Bernays and Lippmann all describe social machinery from the outside. Each observes the apparatus and tries to understand its workings:

• Le Bon, a sociologist, studies the crowd.
• Bernays, an advertising man, studies its tricks.
• Lippmann, a political journalist, studies its maps.

The common stance is that of an outside observer.

A different approach climbs inside the machine, into the people who compose it, to see what is in there. It asks what happens in the brain of a single person who, at a certain moment, stops being an individual and becomes part of a crowd. What is triggered? What switches on? What old, deep and only partly tamed impulse wakes in a civilized human being who finds himself among a hundred thousand people shouting one word?

Carl Gustav Jung supplied the best answer. A Swiss psychiatrist, he had a garden on Lake Zurich, a dream archive that reached the height of a library, and a disturbing idea about what sits in the basement of every mind. His account begins with the individual absorbed into the crowd, and it promises to complete the picture that the external observers had only sketched, better than the others combined.

Key Takeaways

• People act on the secondhand version of the world that reaches them, so a shift in that version can turn neighbors into enemies while nothing on the ground has moved.
• Stereotypes are the working equipment of perception rather than a flaw in it, which makes the contest over a society's stock figures a deeper form of power than any single message.
• Handing decisions to experts and simplifying choices for the public entered political thought as a functional necessity of modern government, and its later career as an accusation is a reversal worth keeping in view.
• When expertise is set against the popular will, the Lippmann-Dewey exchange is being replayed, and knowing its two poles makes the present version easier to hear.
• The social machine has been mapped thoroughly from outside; what wakes inside one person who dissolves into a crowd is the harder question, and it is the one Jung addresses most completely.

CHAPTER FOUR

Overview

What makes a whole society turn a group into the embodiment of evil while ordinary people feel certain they are acting rightly? The question is not why some individuals are cruel, but how collective certainty forms, and it is harder to answer than any familiar account suggests.

In 1936 Carl Gustav Jung, sixty-one, boarded a train for Berlin. He had introduced the collective unconscious, archetypes, the Shadow, and individuation. Berlin meant Hitler three years in power, race laws, and a nation Jung diagnosed with mass psychosis:

• loss of critical judgment
• identification with an idealized image
• projection of evil onto an enemy
• omnipotence
• detachment from reality

A psychotic individual goes to a clinic; a psychotic nation goes to war.

A House With Several Floors

Jung pictured the psyche as a house. Consciousness is the lit upper floor. Below lies Freud's personal unconscious: repressed memories, childhood wounds, desires we refuse to admit. Jung added a deeper floor no individual built, the collective unconscious, shared by humanity and filled with archetypes. These innate patterns cover:

• mother
• hero
• enemy
• journey
• death
• monster
• Shadow
• anima

They activate automatically: a child afraid of the dark is not obeying instruction; the monster archetype is doing protective work. Propaganda presses the same buttons. A leader who says an enemy is attacking and asks followers to join him triggers archetypes that work across cultures.

The Shadow and the Enemy

The Shadow is everything a person refuses to be: cruelty, envy, appetite for harm. Balanced people watch it; dangerous people deny it. Denial does not remove it. The Shadow is projected onto the neighbor:

• selfishness onto the foreigner
• violence onto the enemy
• greed onto the immigrant
• unconfessed desire onto whoever is different, called perversion and persecuted

Collectively, the target stops being an opponent and becomes Evil, the sole cause of suffering, inhuman, and open to anything. Jung saw this beneath pogroms and genocide. The source is not ignorance or poverty but an unacknowledged Shadow seeking somewhere to unload.

Jung's Compromise

Jung's record is compromised. In 1933 he accepted the presidency of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, based in Germany, and stayed as it was nazified. He wrote of Aryan and Jewish psychologies with different collective unconscious layers. He said he remained to protect Jewish colleagues, and documents show interventions; some historians see naivety, others opportunism. Even a man who understood projection could be caught, so understanding manipulation does not confer immunity.

The Individual as Antidote

In The Undiscovered Self (1957) and Civilization in Transition, Jung argued that neither state nor church can defend against mass psychosis. The defense is the individual who has integrated the Shadow through individuation, becoming all of oneself, uncomfortable parts included. The earlier thinkers looked at the crowd from above; Jung looked from inside the person who needs the crowd to feel real, unload the Shadow, and find an enemy who explains inner unease. The crowd is a sign of sickness, not its source. Technical remedies matter, but Jung adds inward work no one can do for another.

Failed Individuation

A paradox: individualism and conformism rise together. Unique people think, buy, and rage alike. Jung called this failed individuation. Without inner work, people substitute surface markers for self-knowledge:

• consumer choices
• fashionable opinions
• identity-group membership

This produces uniformity dressed as individuality. Social media makes it visible: millions repeat the same sentences and share the same outrages within a day, moved by emotional contagion rather than argument, as Le Bon described in 1895. Jung died in 1961, before the internet, but would have recognized it. He quoted Homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man. The wolf lives where we refuse to look. As long as evil is located only in the neighbor, fear and projected rage leave the strings available to any puppeteer.

Four Views of the Crowd

From Le Bon in 1895 to Jung in 1957:

• Le Bon: the crowd is distinct from its members and obeys three levers:
  • assertion
  • repetition
  • contagion
• Bernays: those levers can be industrialized, with desire manufactured.
• Lippmann: people live in a pseudo-environment, and controlling it shapes opinion unnoticed.
• Jung: the unknown self opens us to propaganda.

These are pieces of one puzzle. Next comes practice.

Key Takeaways

• The archetypes are the mechanism through which mass persuasion works: propaganda does not install alien feelings but activates patterns already present in every psyche.
• Collective cruelty originates in the unacknowledged Shadow of those who commit it; the enemy is chosen because it can carry what the group refuses to see in itself.
• Understanding projection offers no immunity, as Jung's own accommodation of the Nazi regime demonstrates; psychological insight and moral failure can coexist in the same person.
• The crowd is a symptom of incomplete inner development rather than its cause, so no state, church, or technical fix can substitute for the individual work of integrating what one would rather deny.
• Individualism and conformity rise together when inner work is skipped: consumer choices, fashionable opinions, and group identities become substitutes for self-knowledge, producing uniformity that feels like uniqueness.